The human environment interface: applying ecosystem concepts to health

Abstract

One Health approaches have tended to focus on closer collaboration among veterinarians and medical professionals, but remain unclear about how ecological approaches could be applied or how they might benefit public health and disease control. In this chapter, we review ecological concepts, and discuss their relevance to health, with an emphasis on emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). Despite the fact that most EIDs originate in wildlife, few studies account for the population, community, or ecosystem ecology of the host, reservoir, or vector. The dimensions of ecological approaches to public health that we propose in this chapter are, in essence, networks of population dynamics, community structure, and ecosystem matrices incorporating concepts of complexity, resilience, and biogeochemical processes.

Fig. 1

Diagram illustrating the ecosystem components described in the text: a node is a population of organisms; edges are links between nodes in a community; and the overall environment including abiotic components is the ecosystem matrix. Nodes are structured vertically into trophic levels and horizontally along an environmental gradient

Fig. 2

An epidemic curve where the upper panel illustrates emerging infectious diseases fluctuating in wildlife populations through time before spilling over to domestic animals then humans. The lower panel demonstrates “getting ahead of the epidemic curve” whereby timely surveillance and control measures mitigate the impact of a disease outbreak through time